The availability of various content items on the Internet allows access to information in bulk. However, the sheer volume of content items available does not increase the usefulness of the content items. The information presented in the content items themselves should be relevant to each user. For example, a user interested in learning about current political developments may request content items. Content items with information on living and style may be irrelevant to the user, even though the same content item may be enjoyable for another user.
Other than matching relevant content items to users' requests, the volume of content items has also made it difficult to select and provide content items in a timely manner. For example, if a content item is not provided within certain time criteria, then a user may have a poor Website experience (e.g., slowly loading Web pages, incorrectly rendered Web pages) or other undesirable effects. Users may grow frustrated and choose to never view content items from that Website again, even if the content items are particularly relevant.
To increase the speed of responding to requests in a request processing system, cache memory may be used. For example, cache memory may be used to store content items or pieces of content items. However, cache memory is limited by the size of the memory available to the cache and how efficiently the cache memory stores, selects, and retrieves information.
Therefore, it is desirable to have improved methods to match users with content items within specified time constraints by using cache memory efficiently.
The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.